PSI - Issue 83

Miloslav Kepka et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 83 (2026) 138–145

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M100, open licences for maraging steel MS1, Inconel 718, stainless steel 316L, Ni-base HX alloy), as well as professional equipment and software for the necessary related activities, which is schematically shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. Complex R&D in additive manufacturing in the RTI research center.

In the first part, the paper provides an overview of several R&D projects that have been implemented in cooperation with foreign RTI partners. In the second part, the potential of continuous monitoring of the printing process is presented, the outputs of which, with the support of a properly trained ML model, could reliably predict defects in the

final product. This is another area open for future international cooperation. 2. Examples of R&D projects implemented in international cooperation

One of the first was an international project supported by the Czech-Bavarian Higher Education Agency with funds from the Bavarian Ministry of Finance and the Homeland. The project was carried out in cooperation with the University of Applied Sciences in Amberg-Weiden, VSB Technical University of Ostrava and Fraunhofer UMSICHT. Students from participating universities were also involved in the project. The project had the following main goals: intensification of border crossing cooperation, further findings in AM materials research, minimization of material usage through reuse cycles, optimization of powder recycling processes, and development of new AM materials. The project was presented to the professional public by Simson et al. (2019). The Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava was successfully involved in the national Czech program TREND. Research in the field of computational and experimental support for 3D printing of metal components manufactured using DMLS technology and subjected to multiaxial fatigue loading laid the foundation for further intensive cooperation. The project workflow and its global conclusions have already been presented by Stepanek et al. (2024). In the field of additive manufacturing, cooperation was also implemented with Auburn University. In the joint study, the effect of various surface treatments, including sand-blasting, drag-finishing, turning, grinding, and grinding + drag-finishing, on surface roughness and fatigue properties of laser beam powder bed fused Inconel 718 was examined. Thus, all surface treatments also led to an improvement in fatigue resistance, with sandblasting and drawing showing the lowest load-bearing capacity, while grinding + drawing produced the highest load-bearing capacity, see Lee et al. (2022).